This morning the Today show, and I will assume other US media outlets, were showing fairly graphic images of the aftermath at school in Pakistan. But when there is a school shooting in the US they never even show a drop of blood. Same sort of thing happens frequently. The evening news will often show dead bodies from foreign disasters, but never does the same for US stories.
Regardless of which type of coverage you feel is appropriate, it is clear that a double standard is there.
I can think of several reasons for the disparate coverage, but basically I think it comes down to the fact that we do not place much value on the lives of people in other countries, particularly if they are not fair-skinned. The viewing public would be offended to see dead americans or blood splatter from a US school shooting but they don’t seem to flinch about seeing the same images from other parts of the world.
Look back at the ebola coverage. They would often show video of people dying in the streets. Would that ever be shown if the sick person was American? Or British? Or German?
I agree that we generally see them as the others and kids here in America as part of us. I think that’s a horrible reality that we need to change.
I was extremely upset about the news yesterday and purposefully avoided seeing the images. I’m not necessarily opposed to showing them so that people can understand the atrocity. You can choose to change the channel or not click a link.
Part of it is what footage is available. My guess is that it’s harder for news outlets to get into where a school shooting takes place in the US than it is for cameras to get into a similar place in Pakistan.
unfortunately seeing the pictures brings home how bad the violence actually is. It’s easy to hear about wars and battles lasting years there and not truly think about the dead and maimed. But when you see it on the evening news it is impossible to ignore. The opposite is true for school & other shootings here, since we don’t see the actual violence but instead just chopper footage of the children being rushed out of the schools in single file lines it’s easier to ignore the truth of so many small dead bodies.
I don’t necessarily see it as a lack of value on others lives, but I don’t know if it’s better to see the images to have a tiny understanding of what “those people” are going through or if it’s better to hide behind the white-washed non-images of violence so that we don’t have to know how bad it truly was. Even though I don’t see it as a lack of value of their lives, I have no alternate theory of the double-standard other than those deaths are generally considered to be casualties of “war” and through history that is an accepted even that causes death and destruction. School shootings despite the commonality of their occurrence aren’t thought of the same way.
It’s a clear double-standard and I don’t think either is right.
Part of it is what footage is available. My guess is that it’s harder for news outlets to get into where a school shooting takes place in the US than it is for cameras to get into a similar place in Pakistan.
When that kid shot his cousins and others in a school cafeteria a few months ago I am sure that plenty of kids started filming on their phones.
When that kid shot his cousins and others in a school cafeteria a few months ago I am sure that plenty of kids started filming on their phones.
I doubt that very much… if it was true, those videos may not have been in mainstream media, but they certainly would’ve surfaced somewhere…
I understand what you are saying, and I can even see that it may seem reasonable at first blush, but think it through some more… Is a kid’s first reaction to bullets suddenly spraying nearby to whip out his/her phone and and start filming?
Didn’t the mood of the America public start to turn against Vietnam once relatively (for the time) graphic video of American casualties started playing on the evening news across America? So, perhaps the video of the Pakistan slaughter was used in a “shock and awe” manner to further drive the point home as to how ruthless these people, and I use the term people loosely, are?
So you’ve seen this happen enough times to differentiate between fair-skinned and dark-skinned video treatment? I am very interested in this type of thing. Can you give me a few of the examples you are thinking of?